Teas await weighing and grading at the Looksun plantation, in West Bengal.

Photograph by Paul Salopek

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Abhina Naik and her daughter Antri are tea pickers in Mujnai Hatkola, West Bengal.

Photograph by Paul Salopek

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Punam Pradhan, the supervisor at the Looksun Plantation, has been in the tea business since he was 19.

Photograph by Paul Salopek

Tap images for captions

Thousands of tea pickers toiled on the remote plantations. Many were indigenous
Adivasi women, the descendants of bonded laborers who were relocated to
the region from elsewhere in India more than a century ago by the colonial
British. Plantation owners preferred hiring women because of their reliability
and purported superior "feel" for plucking tea leaves. The women
waded through the waist-high tea bushes, armored in aprons and gloves against
the stiff, sharp branches. They lived with their families in shacks without
plumbing. The nearest decent hospital was a four-hour bus ride away. They
earned poverty wages—the equivalent of $2.44 a day.

“The wage is low, but what else can we do?” said Lalita, a 40-year-old
picker at the Looksun Estate, who uses only one name. “We have to survive.”
She said leopards often prowled the tea gardens and had to be scared away
with firecrackers. Wild elephants stampeded through in June and July. Cobras
surfaced from their holes during the monsoon. “They don’t do anything to
us, we don’t do anything to them,” she said. “And then they go back home.”

The Communist Party of India had
planted its hammer and sickle flag at the tea estate entrance. Its cadre
was agitating for a daily wage hike of 50 rupees: about 70 cents. The plantation’s
supervisor, a melancholic man sitting in the estate’s archaic tea factory,
said it would never happen.

This story was originally published on the National Geographic Society’s
website devoted to the Out of Eden Walk project. Explore the site here.

Paul Salopekwon two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism while a foreign correspondent with the Chicago
Tribune. Follow him on Twitter @paulsalopek.

PUBLISHED August 30, 2019

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